Abstract
Extending the critique of trauma theory by scholars like Ruth Leys, Wulf Kansteiner, and Harald Weilnböck, this chapter criticizes the transformation of the trauma concept from signifying the psychological aftereffects of extreme violence into a metaphor for a stipulated postmodern crisis of signification. The supposedly extensive interdisciplinary links of trauma theory to therapeutic practice, psychoanalytic theory, and cognitive science are not only superficial, but its trauma concept is inherently incompatible with these disciplines and the simulation of interdisciplinarity thus solely serves to authorize postmodern speculations. Moreover, trauma is turned into a quasi-sacred object of veneration whose representation is simultaneously defined as impossible and prohibited as sacrilegious—rather untenable axioms for a scholarly discourse. Similarly nonsensical and unethical is the claim that trauma can only be communicated indirectly as an infection that supposedly traumatizes those who listen to survivor testimony or consume media artifacts depicting traumatizing experiences. This notion not only equates listening to survivor testimony in face-to-face interaction with media consumption and with the immediate experience of traumatizing events, but also confuses and conflates the subject position of victim and perpetrator. For these reasons, I consider trauma theory to be both nonsensical and irresponsible.
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Notes
- 1.
Leys’ socio-culturally contextualized intellectual history of the trauma concept does not employ any of the arguments made in the three inaugural texts of postmodern trauma theory. Moreover, the last two chapters in which she radically critiques both van der Kolk’s arguments and their reception in trauma theory as well as Caruth’s arguments differ significantly in their discursive mode of polemical argument from the predominantly descriptive and narrative mode employed in the previous chapters. Therefore, I consider her critique like Kansteiner’s, Weilnböck’s, and my own to reflect a discursive position that is external rather than internal to trauma theory.
- 2.
Kansteiner (2004) is a notable exception. However, in the essay he coauthored with Weilnböck, the authors do employ polemical discourse in order to radically critique the notion of trauma as conceptualized in postmodern theory.
- 3.
At least once, van der Kolk (1996, 297) does however admit, if only in a footnote, that after more than two decades of research and a plethora of publications, he had been unable to empirically verify his core hypotheses: “The question of whether the brain is able to ‘take pictures,’ and whether some smells, images, sounds, or physical sensations may be etched onto the mind and remain unaltered by subsequent experience and by the passage of time, still remains to be answered.”
- 4.
According to Gary Weissman (2004, 236), “in the preface and two introductory essays she wrote for Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth refers to traumatic experience, traumatic events, the traumatic reexperience of the event, traumatic symptoms, the traumatic occurrence, the traumatic nightmare, traumatic dreams and flashbacks, traumatic reenactment, traumatic recall, traumatic recollection, traumatic suffering, traumatic pasts, and traumatic history. Not once, however, does she refer to traumatic memory or traumatic memories.” And although she employs both “trauma” and “memory” in the title of her edited volume and in two chapter titles of her monograph, “the word scarcely appears elsewhere in its pages. In fact, the book’s index includes only two page reference for ‘memory,’ one of them in error.”
- 5.
While Laub shares the trauma theory axiom of the supposed impossibility of experiencing trauma at the time of occurrence, as a practicing psychoanalyst, he does believe that narration, and representation more generally, are possible and necessary in order to work through the traumatizing experience. For Laub, testimony thus has a therapeutic function. However, the fact that he does not share the axiom that trauma cannot and must not be represented central to Felman and Caruth is largely effaced both in his own essays and their references to them.
- 6.
Only previously traumatized individuals and very young children, who have not yet acquired the cognitive maturity to clearly distinguish between reality and representation, may be (re)traumatized by the consumption of media violence.
- 7.
The essay was reprinted as “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle” in Caruth (1995, pp. 61–75). Laub’s notion of generating the witness in the discursive interaction between a therapist-interlocutor and a survivor implicitly excludes all non-surviving victims from witness status and their diaries and other documentation from constituting testimony. Despite the fact that the claim that traumatic events are categorically impossible to experience and that only in narrating them can survivors therefore become witnesses is untenable and unethical, it is central to trauma theory. It was taken up and expanded, for instance, by Kali Tal (1995) and Thomas Trezise (2013).
- 8.
My critique is informed by Gross and Hoffman (2004).
- 9.
White still sought to safeguard his dubious notion that history is infinitely emplottable by ascribing special epistemological status to a small number of so-called limit events, of which the Holocaust constitutes the paradigmatic instance, and only conceded that such limit events are not infinitely emplottable because certain modes of emplotment, such as comedy or pastoral, would not constitute adequate emplotments. Contrary to White, I would argue that such modes of emplotting the Holocaust are currently ethically unacceptable but they are not inherently less veridical or historically reliable.
- 10.
Even as acerbic a critic as Harald Weilnböck acknowledged that trauma theory is “permeated by signs of the utmost respect and compassion for those who suffered (in the Holocaust and/or other atrocities), as well as indications of a vocation to help maintain the legacy of the victims” (2008, para. 87).
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Rothe, A. (2016). Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory. In: Ataria, Y., Gurevitz, D., Pedaya, H., Neria, Y. (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_12
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